Interventional studies

CPRD offers research services to support innovative electronic health record (EHR) enabled real-world studies, to improve the efficiency of clinical research.

Services are based on a recruitment pool of 11 million patients registered at a network of GP practices across the UK.

CPRD can provide the following services:

Study planning

CPRD can support a sponsor’s trial feasibility and protocol optimisation by extracting data from patient EHRs using near real-time estimates to obtain real-world insights on patient characteristics and geographical location. Searches on the data based on required criteria can help define the patient population and result in optimisations that have a significant impact on patient recruitment, reducing the need for protocol amendments later in the study and help define the parameters required for the study endpoints.

Patient recruitment

CPRD’s study recruitment service uses data derived from primary care EHRs to locate eligible patients. The GP is subsequently provided with a pre-screened list of pseudonymised patients to identify and refer into secondary recruitment sites or directly consent patients into a clinical study in primary care.

Study execution

This service uses an integrated platform to undertake site initiation, database configuration for study data capture, provide tailor-made dashboards and interfaces for use by GPs, patients, CPRD study managers and sponsors.

The output of this service may be an analysis ready dataset including any additional data collected in the study such as patient questionnaires or extend to study data analysis. Long term (5 years+) follow-up can be provided.

Supplementary data collection

This is a service that provides data augmenting research, based on CPRD's primary care datasets. Researchers may seek to supplement or validate findings from an observational research study using CPRD data (GP validation study) or patient questionnaires that may or may not become a component of a clinical trial.